On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Gadi Evron wrote:
Props to Jeff Chan who I saw it from.
Yes, I still believe these ISP distributed machines called broadband routers are a network operators issue. But not all may agree on that.
I doubt many ISP security or customer care folks are fans of UPnP. The distribution channel (consumer electronics retail store, discount mail order company, etc) is less important than working with the CPE vendors. I worked with a few CPE vendors for several years since 2003 to improve some things. You may be able to figure out which CPE vendors, because they have UPnP off by default (or don't have UPnP), and other nice things such as automatic security patch loading. CPE owners take even less care of the CPE than even PCs. But even though a few other large ISPs copied some of my requirements for their RFPs, a lot of CPE is distributed through many channels. I'm a bit suspicious of some security researcher's statistics about UPnP gateway configurations in different markets. If you just want to rant at network operators go ahead. But it will probably be more productive working with CPE vendors and ISPs on a few constructive things. What specifications can consumer electronics stores and ISPs include in the RFPs to consumer CPE vendors? What can consumer CPE vendors include at the price-points for the market for consumer CPE? Is the Carterphone era over, and consumers just can't handle managing CPE anymore?